


jane again

by leoandsnake



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Domestic, F/F, Grief, Guilt, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Pregnancy, Starting Over, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 15:07:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: If Jane wears civvies and ties her hair back, no one notices her. The other volunteers look right past her -- just some redhead, another soot-smeared, dead-eyed veteran working to put the city back together. She gives her name freely as Jane. Everybody only ever knew her as Commander Shepard, anyway.





	jane again

When it's all over, they both end up on Earth.

Jane wakes up in a half-ruined hospital in London with Liara at her bedside. There’s a hole in the ceiling that she can see the sky through. Rubble everywhere on the floor. She coughs.

Liara is half-asleep in a chair next to her. Her eyes spring open.

“Oh,” she says, breathy. “Oh, Shepard.”

She comes close and sits on the edge of Jane’s bed, gazing at her, reaching up with a blue hand to stroke her hair off her face.

Jane takes inventory of her person. Everything bandaged, everything sore. Several ribs broken. Her head is throbbing.

“You’ve been in a coma for more than a month,” Liara whispers, and squeezes her hand. Jane forgot the touch of an asari -- smoother skin, like a porpoise, but not as warm as humans. “It took us that long to get the Normandy back to Earth. The relays are gone, all destroyed. We were shot to a nearby system. We, all the crew, we returned two days ago.”

“The --” Jane coughs again. Her mouth is dry, her tongue atrophied. “Gone?”

Liara nods. “I was so afraid,” she says softly, “that by the time we arrived, if you were alive and awake, you would think we abandoned you.”

“No, no,” Jane says with difficulty. “Wouldn’t have. Never.”

“But I knew you were alive, Shepard. I could feel it.”

“Yeah?” Jane tries to squeeze back, but her own hand is bandaged and aching.

Liara nods. “I refused to let them give up. Only Joker believed me. Garrus was sure you were gone. He got angry with me, that I kept saying otherwise.”

Her voice wavers. Jane gives her a smile.

“I’m alive,” she says.

 

/

 

They stay in London.

The clean-up necessary is immense. A month later, the streets are still piled with rubble -- bodies in the rubble, pieces of Reapers and starships and shuttles scattered everywhere.

For a few weeks, Jane lets Liara nurse her in a flat they rented, then insists on joining the clean-up effort. The first day, Liara lingers worriedly at the top of the foyer stairs as a still-aching Jane takes a full minute to get her boots on, taking painful half-breaths so not to expand her broken ribs.

“Shepard,” is all she says, just once, in a warning voice.

Jane looks up at her and smiles weakly. Liara smiles back.

“I gotta do something,” she says. “I can’t sit around. You know me.”

“I do,” Liara says, and hesitates. “Please bring back any Reaper tech you find, alright?”

Liara is working with a team of other scientists to piece together a whole Reaper from the destroyed pieces. They’ve got the hull mostly together, by now, by they’re missing key internal constructs. The little pieces.

Jane isn’t entirely supportive of this project. She finds it ghoulish, and worries that Liara is going to use their findings for Shadow Broker means. “Would you smash a spider in your kitchen, then put it back together to see how it works?” she said the other day, to a reproachful glare from Liara.

“Yeah, babe,” Jane says, gingerly shrugging her jacket on. “I will.”

Liara comes down the stairs and kisses her. She still refuses human civvies -- even in the house, she’s got on a lab outfit that she had Garrus bring down from her Normandy footlocker, when he visited.

Jane kisses her back, hard, their teeth clicking. When she thought she was about to die, Liara was all she thought about. That she’d never get another good morning kiss from her, goodbye kiss, any of it. It was unbearable.

“Have a nice day at the office,” Liara jokes, in her inimitably deadpan voice. Jane laughs.

 

/  


If Jane wears civvies and ties her hair back, no one notices her. The other volunteers look right past her -- just some redhead, another soot-smeared, dead-eyed veteran working to put the city back together. She gives her name freely as Jane. Everybody only ever knew her as Commander Shepard, anyway.

Someone did recognize her at the store the other day. She was scanning a mango, and said out loud, “Sixty credits? Seriously?” and a teenaged kid turned around as if he recognized her voice from the vids.

“Shepard!” he shouted. “Holy shit, Commander Shepard!” and in an instant, she was swarmed by rabid well-wishers like she was Jesus Christ himself, all shouting and clamoring and begging for answers.

She ran. Not very heroic of her, but she ran. She's slow on her feet, still healing, but she’s also an N7 and a Spectre -- she knows how to get the hell out of dodge.

It’s on the news vids that night, that she’s in town. She and Liara sit on the couch together, watching, and Liara heaves a sigh.

“Maybe we ought to --”

“Go where?” Jane says, finishing her thought for her. “Citadel’s destroyed. FTL’s down, we can’t go to Illium.”

Liara has a massive penthouse and offices on Illium, her Shadow Broker lair, that currently sit empty. They can still communicate with other star systems, but the intel coming out is jumbled and often contradictory, and travel takes ages. By the time you get somewhere, the reason for going may no longer exist. They still have only scraps of information about how Illium fared when the Reapers made their final siege.

It all reminds Jane of what she knows of history. London destroyed like it was in the Blitz, FTL reduced to what overseas travel used to be like. Months on a boat with no idea what was waiting for you. Everything old is new again.

“Another city on Earth, then,” Liara says.

“I’m game,” Jane replies. “But let me finish helping clean this one up.”

Liara bites her bottom lip.

“Look, it makes me feel better. It does.” Jane hesitates. “I can’t help feel responsible.”

“You saved the galaxy, Shepard. You are the last person who should feel responsible. You ought to be resting, taking a breath, letting your well-wishers shower you in gratitude.”

“ _Gratitude?_ I killed EDI.” Her voice wavers. “I killed all the geth. I killed our friends.”

“You destroyed the Reapers,” Liara says, and turns, looking sharply into her eyes. Jane looks down and away, her face hot with shame. “You saved us all. You couldn’t trust that that apparition was telling you the truth. Become _one_ with these creatures? You made the only choice that made any sense, the choice we had been working toward for years. EDI would be proud to have given her life to end all of this. Any of us would have given our lives, including you.”

Jane shakes her head. Her eyes are welling; she blinks it back.

“I need time, babe,” she says hoarsely. “I need to help, I need to do something with my hands. It’ll fade, but I need to be distracted, in the meantime. You know how it is.”

“I do,” Liara says, and strokes her face. “All I did was distract myself with work, when I thought you were dead. Both of the times that I thought you were dead.”

Jane finally looks at her, then. Liara’s face is comforting. A sea of blue. Blue skin, blue eyes. Like a piece of Earth’s sky sitting on the couch next to her, loving her fiercely.

“So you get it,” she says.

 

/

 

Jane hasn’t seen or talked to Joker since she woke up. She’s talked to everyone else. Had drinks with Garrus (“When I said meet me at the bar if this thing goes sideways,” he said sardonically, “I meant the bar in heaven, not some hole in the wall on Earth with the windows bombed out.”), sat down with Miranda in her gleaming new downtown office to talk about reconstruction efforts -- she’s leading the charge to redesign and repair the Citadel, and she offers Jane a job on the board, which Jane scoffs at.

“Come on,” Miranda goads in that sumptuous accent of hers. “Wouldn’t that be something? Commander Shepard, back from the dead yet again, a beacon of hope for all of us yet again. Paving the way to a new tomorrow."

“I am paving the way to a new tomorrow,” Jane argues. “On the ground.”

“You’re digging around in rubble with a shovel all day,” Miranda says, cocking an eyebrow.

“I like it. Feels good. Feels better than serving on a board and pushing paper around would, trust me.”

“Shit,” Miranda sighs, “you’ve always been so apolitical. I don’t know what to do with you. You’re my first pick for human ambassador when we get the council back up and running, you know. But you’d never take it, would you?”

“I’d honestly rather you kill me,” she says. “Not that I even can be killed, apparently.”

Miranda laughs at this. Jane saves all her grimmest jokes for Miranda.

She hears from Liara that a grief-sick Joker has taken the Normandy and set course for Ilos with Javik to look for any answers that got left behind in their mad dash to reach Saren. Without relays, the trip will take more than a year. She finds this out only after Joker has gone.

“Well, Dr. T’Soni,” she says drily, leaning over the back of the couch. Liara is idly flipping through a datapad. “Convenient timing, telling me after he left.”

It’s a misty English afternoon. They’re huddled indoors, because every time it rains here now, a ton of soot and debris ends up coming down in the drops. The streets and gutters flow black for days after.

“He seemed to be in a hurry to leave,” Liara murmurs. “And not too eager to see you. I wouldn’t take it personally, but I thought it best to wait until he had gone to tell you.”

“Joker and Javik, alone on a ship together for a year,” Jane muses. “Almost sorry I’m missing that.”

“I can hack into the bridge surveillance cameras at any time,” Liara says, turning with a smile. “If we want some entertainment. Just say the word, Commander.”

She still calls her Commander, even if she isn’t really the commander of anything anymore. Jane appreciates it.

 

/

 

Their sex life, funnily, is the best that it’s ever been. Jane is no longer exhausted from the weight of the warring galaxy on her shoulders the way she was on the Normandy, and they’re both desperate now to focus on each other instead of the daily drudgery of mourning their dead friends and colleagues and putting a planet back together.

They bury themselves in each other, melding fiercely, Jane forcefully losing her own identity every time and enveloping herself in Liara, only Liara. Sometimes in the middle of sex she thinks she is Liara, she looks down at her own hands and they look blue, she kisses Liara and feels her own lips on herself. Liara murmurs sweetly to her, helping her lose herself, helping her let go.

Jane’s so grateful for her, in these moments. If she were alone right now she might really have finally lost it. It’s too much for one person, everything that’s happened to her. It can only be shared. She gives it to Liara in hesitant increments when they make love, pulling the glass shards of her burden out of herself and turning them over to her lover, who in the infinite wisdom and patience of the asari, makes them vanish into thin air.

She doesn't have nightmares, those nights after they meld. It's the only time she doesn't.

 

/

 

Five months after she wakes up, Liara brings Jane to the hangar where her team of anthropologists is putting the final touches on their re-assembled Reaper.

Standing in its massive shadow, looking up at it, Jane feels a pang of familiar terror. There’s something so unholy about these creatures, so frightening on a primal level, like an itch deep in your lizard brain.

At the same time, taken out of context like this, no lights and no horns, it looks harmless. Just a useless object sitting here in the dusty light streaming through the high windows, roped off like a museum dinosaur. Posing no more threat than the bones of a T-rex would.

Liara notices her funny expression and nudges her shoulder. “It makes me feel better,” she says softly, “having so much control over it.”

“I don’t get you sometimes, T’Soni,” Jane says, nudging her back.

A smile dances on Liara’s lips, as she looks up at the Reaper husk. “Knowledge is power.”

“A human said that,” Jane says, and follows her gaze.

“Oh, I know. One of your scientists.”

“I thought he was a philosopher.”

“A philosopher-scientist.”

“Why aren’t you helping with the finishing touches?” Jane says. “Not on my account, right? I don’t mind waiting, if you want to go be Dr. Frankenstein.”

Liara laughs. “I have actually taken myself off of any duties involving direct Reaper handling.”

Jane studies her. “Why’s that?”

Liara glances at her. “Shepard,” she says. “You can be a little dense, can’t you?”

“Dense?” Jane says, offended. “Dense how?”

Liara gazes at her dreamily for a moment, smiling like she has a secret. Then she takes Jane’s hand and guides it to her stomach, which is warm. Much warmer than the rest of her. And maybe, now that she’s thinking about it, a little rounder than usual.

Jane’s mouth falls open. “No shit?”

“No shit,” Liara affirms.

Jane wraps her arms around her, kissing her, and Liara laughs, the sound of it echoing musically through the hangar.

 

/

 

 

They go to the beach, once the water’s clean enough to. Liara’s very pregnant by then, and steps into the water gingerly, only up to her ankles.

“What’s up?” Jane says, hiking her wet board shorts up where they’ve slid down her hips.

“Generally, asari are advised not to swim while with child,” she says, glancing up at Jane, squinting in the hazy summer sunshine. “But only because of the eezo-rich water on Thessia. It’s an old wives tale, actually. But...”

Jane paddles out into the ocean, smiling at her. “Water feels fine to me.”

Liara’s lips quirk upward and she steps the rest of the way in, then swims out to Jane. Jane wraps an arm around her.

The two of them bob in the water comfortably. No one else is at this part of the beach -- the sand is strewn with rocky outcroppings.

A piece of seaweed brushes their feet. Jane jerks in fear, and Liara laughs.

“I forget how dangerous this planet can be,” she says. “What are those things you have? Sharks? Did you think that was a shark?”

“No sharks around here, I hope,” Jane mutters. “Probably the fallout killed most of the stuff close to shore. I'm surprised there's even seaweed.”

“Oh, that makes me sad,” Liara says. There’s a drop of water on her nose. Jane kisses it off. “I think things are gradually returning to normal, though. My recent soil tests were much more encouraging than the ones I took when I first arrived.”

“It’s been almost a year,” Jane says. “If you can believe it.”

“Joker will be back soon,” Liara says. “With the Normandy.”

Jane slips her hand along the swell of Liara's middle and rests it on her waist. “I’m not letting you anywhere near a battle-class starship, right now. Sorry.”

Liara laughs. “Someday. When the relays are repaired. I would like to convene with other asari. We have so much work to do… colonizing a new homeworld, to begin with.”

Jane has a pang. “Sorry. I push Thessia out of my head, a lot of the time.”

“It’s okay, Shepard.” Liara looks pensive as she bobs in the water, her blue eyes dancing, brow slightly furrowed. “I spent much of my life off-world. It is tragic, of course. Our children will never know how wonderful and peaceful it was there.”

“I know,” Jane says gruffly. “I think about that sometimes.”

She thinks, too, about the fact that both Liara and their children will outlive her by centuries. She hates that -- she wants to always be with her, always be there for her. It makes her want to have as many babies with Liara as she can, so she’s never alone, so someone will always take care of her. Bring her toast when she gets engrossed in research and forgets to eat, keep an eye on her Shadow Broker dealings.

“But they’ll know a more peaceful galaxy,” Liara says, and kisses her. “Because of you.”

“Because of all of us,” Jane corrects. “The entire Alliance. My team. _You_.”

“Only one woman pulled the switch to destroy the Reapers,” Liara says, in that soft lilting voice of hers.

Jane supposes that’s true. She supposes she’ll be grappling with that for the rest of her life.

Today, though, she won’t grapple. She just bobs in the ocean, lost in the blue.


End file.
